The Latest Bounce

Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif., is ready to
reopen the U.S. coast for offshore drilling (HCN,
7/25/05: Will the real Mr. Pombo please stand up?). New drilling
has been prohibited off the coast, except in Alaska and the Gulf of
Mexico, since the early 1980s, thanks to a congressional
moratorium. But in October, Pombo introduced a measure that would
let individual states — including California, which happens
to have a $6 billion budget deficit — opt out of the
moratorium in return for a cut of drilling royalties.

Nevada’s neighbors are finding increasing evidence
to back their claims that the Silver State’s gold
mines are spewing mercury across the West (HCN, 8/8/05: The Great
Salt Lake's dirty little secret). This fall, the Idaho Department
of Environmental Quality sampled water quality in Salmon Falls
Creek Reservoir, south of Twin Falls. Mercury levels in the
reservoir, a popular fishing destination downwind from a cluster of
large Nevada gold mines, were 150 times higher than heavily
polluted lakes in the northeastern U.S.

The
grazing fees that the federal government charges ranchers for using
public lands don’t even cover one-sixth of the cost
of running the grazing program. According to a new report from the
Government Accountability Office, the federal grazing program lost
$123 million last year (HCN, 4/4/05: The Big Buyout). The GAO,
which noted that grazing fees have not changed significantly in 25
years, said the report’s findings highlighted the need to
"reexamine programs to assess their relevance and relative priority
for a changing society."

A federal district
judge has flamed the Forest Service for refusing to
analyze the environmental impact of the fire retardant
used by its air tankers (HCN, 7/7/03: War on fire takes a toll on
fish). In 2003, after several retardant drops killed tens of
thousands of fish, the nonprofit Forest Service Employees for
Environmental Ethics sued to force the agency to evaluate the
effect of fire retardant on fish. But the government argued that
fire-retardant use was a site-specific action by fire managers
— who had better things to do than carry out environmental
analyses. That, Judge Donald Molloy wrote, was "not a reasonable
conclusion."